Exacta & accurata delineatio cum orarum maritimarum tum etjam locorum terrestrium quae in Regionibus China, Cauchinchina, Camboja sive Champa, Syao, Malacca, Arracan & Pegu

Jan Huygen van Linschoten was a Dutch traveller, merchant, and writer whose years in Portuguese Goa gave him access to closely held information about Iberian navigation and overseas trade. In 1583 he travelled to Goa, where he served as secretary to João Vicente da Fonseca, the Portuguese Archbishop of Goa. This position placed him near the centre of Portuguese administration and commerce in the Indian Ocean.

After returning to the Dutch Republic in 1592, Linschoten prepared his observations for publication with the Amsterdam publisher Cornelis Claesz. His Itinerario, Voyage ofte Schipvaert naer Oost ofte Portugaels Indien was published in Amsterdam in 1596. Although best known for opening up Portuguese knowledge of the East Indies, the work also covered the wider Iberian maritime world, including Africa, Brazil, Spanish America, and the sea routes linking Europe, the Atlantic, and Asia. An English translation, Discours of Voyages into ye Easte & West Indies, followed in London in 1598 (356). Oriented with north to the left, this map presents the maritime world of East and Southeast Asia, from China, Korea, and Japan to Cochinchina, Champa, Siam, Malacca, Arakan, Pegu, the Philippines, Borneo, Java, Sumatra, the Moluccas, New Guinea, and the surrounding seas. It is one of the most visually and geographically ambitious maps in Linschoten’s Itinerario, combining dense coastal names with rhumb lines, compass roses, ships, sea monsters, land animals, and information useful to navigation.

The map was designed by Arnold Florent van Langren and engraved by his brother Henricus Florent van Langren in 1595 for inclusion in the 1596 Itinerario. It was based largely on Portuguese sources, and the text of the Itinerario emphasises its attention to shallows, reefs, and maritime hazards. Its mapping of Southeast Asia and Japan reflects the influence of Fernão Vaz Dourado, while the depiction of China draws on Luís Jorge de Barbuda, a Portuguese mapmaker in the service of Philip II of Spain. The map also carries older and more speculative geography. South of Java appears Beach provincia aurifera, the “gold-bearing province of Beach, ” a legendary place associated with European readings of Java Minor and the imagined geography of the far south. New Guinea is accompanied by an inscription questioning whether it is an island or part of the southern continent. These features connect the map with both Portuguese-derived navigation in East and Southeast Asia and late sixteenth-century ideas of Terra Australis.

This map belongs to the wider cartographic and illustrative programme of Linschoten’s Itinerario, which included a world map by Petrus Plancius (71), first published in 1594, and five regional maps associated with Arnold Florent van Langren and Henricus Florent van Langren: Asia and the Indian Ocean (254), South and West Africa (277), East Africa and the western Indian Ocean (278), South and Central America (279) and this present map of East and Southeast Asia.